Naaju Breaking News, Live Updates, Latest Headlines, Viral News, Top Stories, Trending Topics, Videos
[ad_1]
the global warming continues to particularly affect the region of rtico, whose temperatures are growing twice as fast as the rest of the Earth, and at this rate, it is expected that the surrounding sea ice disappears in the next 20 to 40 years.
A report produced by a group of scientists from United States Atmosphere and Ocean Agency (NOAA) points out that if the record reached in 2012 has not yet been broken, this year’s thaw is quite close.
The pack, that is, the ice that floats on water melts in summer and reforms in winter, but every year it tends to melt a little more during the summer and replenish a little less during the winter. Thus, the end of summer 2020 was the second worst year on record after 2012: half of the sea ice has already been lost from its historical level.
Since 2010, a new generation of satellites have been able to measure the thickness of the ice, and there is no good news here either: the ice is thinner, younger and less compact.
What the NOAA report says
the Arctic Report Card 2020 compiles a large number of figures illustrating the complexity of the climate system: what happens in the arctic does not stay in the arctic, and the climate of the rest of the planet, winds, sea currents influence what happens at the North Pole. Likewise, the South Pole is comparatively more isolated.
A statistic hidden on page 13 illustrates this complexity very well: Northern Alaska had its coldest February of 2020 in three decades, and it was also colder than usual in March in Svalbard, at the north end of Norway. Instead, the vast Russian region of Siberia it broke temperature records (3 to 5 C above normal) and experienced extreme fires in the spring.
The phenomenon of “amplificacin rtica“, which causes this region to heat up faster than mid-latitudes, is in full swing. This is evidenced by the air temperature at the surface of the Arctic During the 2019-2020 period, it was 1.9C higher than the 1981-2010 average and the second hottest year on record since 1900.
At a time, the ocean is getting warmer too. The water temperature in August was 1 to 3 ° C warmer at the surface than the 1982-2010 average.
Here again, the phenomena are interconnected and feed off each other. When the ice melts, exposing the ocean, the water absorbs more heat from solar radiation, which in turn worsens the melting of sea ice. “You have to understand that the Arctic is a system of interconnected components,” Donald Perovich, professor at Dartmouth University and co-author of the chapter on sea ice, told AFP news agency. “You are changing one thing. and that generates a domino effect throughout the system. ”
The pack ice is a symbol of these changes, being both an indicator and an amplifier of global warming. Its thaw does not directly contribute to the rise in the level of the oceans, since it is already in the water, but it affects it indirectly by heating the water.
The real impact, for researchers, dates back to September 2007, when the sea ice melt in summer was extreme (Only 2012 broke this record since then). “We never got back to the levels of 2006 or before,” says Professor Perovich. “We are in a new regime.”
If this phenomenon continues to accelerate, models predict that there will be no more sea ice in the summer between 2040 and 2060. “The deep and gradual thaw of permafrost in this region is expected to start in 30 to 40 years,” the report warns.
.
[ad_2]
Source link
